The streets today are still sealed behind a high fence of yellow plastic
panels, like a Berlin Wall of environmental quarantine. Every 20 feet a
posted sign warns: CONTAMINATED AREA. NO ADMITTANCE.
Some of the telephone lines leading to the shuttered houses lie slack in
lush summer growths of hydrangea that bloom unattended. But no matter,
because the phones never ring any more. Two years after the disaster
known as "Italy's Hiroshima," the core of Seveso is a dead community,
and no one knows whenif everit will become habitable again.

A parliamentary investigating committee has issued a damning report on
Italy's worst ecological disaster. On July 10, 1976, an explosion at
the Swiss-owned Icmesa chemical plant discharged a thick white cloud of
dioxin, one of the deadliest known poisons, over some 4,000 acres of
the small industrial suburb 13 miles north of Milan. As the poison
settled on homes and gardens in the following days, thousands of pets
died, crops were infected and hundreds of people developed nausea,
blurred vision and, especially among children, the disfiguring sores of
a skin disease known as chloracne.

Today, according to the report, a five-mile wedge of Seveso has been
successfully detoxified, at a cost of $32 million, by government teams
that cleared and buried entire acres of plants and even topsoil. Most
of the 736 residents who were originally evacuated have been able to
return to their homes, but 285 are still locked out of a 215-acre area
enclosed by the yellow fence. That inner bulls-eye remains blighted by
concentrated "leopard spots" of contamination and continues to defy all
attempts at purification. "It may be a wasteland foreverwe just don't
know what to do," admits a committee member. Even total incineration of
the entire area has been rejected for eradicating a poison 1,000 times
more toxic than strychnine.

The committee report spares almost no one who was involved in the
disaster. The operation of the plant, owned by the Swiss firm Givaudan
of the Hoffmann-La Roche chemical and pharmaceutical group, was unsafe
to begin with. Company officials waited 27 hours after the accident
before notifying municipal officials of the danger. Even then, city and
provincial administrators were slow to respond. In separate judicial
actions, in fact, ten local officials face possible charges of
dereliction of duty.

Miraculously, the contamination has caused no known human death thus
far. All but two of the 187 children initially stricken with chloracne
have recovered, and delayed-action cases that continue to occur have
been responding to medication. Fear of other aftereffects, however, has
infected the people psychologically. Medical researchers are concerned
that the dioxin could have serious future effects on the livers of
those exposed to it. Soon after the explosion, 33 pregnant women
underwent therapeutic abortions for fear of malformed births. Since
then the birth rate in Seveso has dropped sharply. Building Contractor
Ugo Basilico, 41, father of a six-year-old son, explains the sad
reason why: "I thought it was about time we had another child, but the
doctor says better wait a while. If you have a baby with some defect,
the baby is there for life."